The
charges against her could set legal precedents, even if she isn't committed
to stand trial, she said.

"I
hope it will help to change the law, so that every person has the right to
choose their own destiny at the time of their choosing," Martens said.

Her
lawyer, Catherine Tyhurst, said the issue of assisted suicide ultimately affects
everybody because everybody dies some day.

"Yes,
this certainly is a global issue," she said. "The issue of when
people are hopelessly ill, in pain and dying whether or not there should be
legislation permitting some form of controlled mechanism to allow those people
to end their lives."

It
is not an offence in Canada to commit suicide, but it is illegal to counsel
or assist in a suicide. The maximum prison sentence is 14 years.

Martens
was arrested last June 26 on a Vancouver Island highway shortly after disembarking
from a ferry from Vancouver.

She
is charged with aiding and counselling the suicides of former nun Monique
Charest, 64, who died on Jan. 7, 2002, in Duncan, and teacher Leyanne Burchell,
52, who died last June in her Vancouver home.

Both
women were believed to be terminally ill.

The
Martens case has generated widespread support in the so-called right- to-die
movement.

The
Hemlock Society USA, an American right-to-die group, donated $5,000 to a Martens'
defence fund.

Right-to-die
groups across Canada have been asking their members to contribute money to
aid her defence.

Martens
supporters in the Duncan area are circulating a petition calling for a halt
to the court case.

Activists
in the right-to-die movement say hundreds of people die by assisted suicide
each year in Canada and the United States.

Russel
Ogden, a Vancouver criminologist who studies covert euthanasia, said it is
difficult to estimate the number of assisted suicides because they are not
documented or reported to official agencies.

He
said there is a worldwide underground assisted-suicide movement that he calls
the "deathing counterculture."

There
are people in the movement who provide referrals, consultations and house
calls for the terminally ill, Ogden said.

The
assisted suicide movement has developed methods of suicide -- primarily helium
gas and so-called plastic exit bags -- that cannot be detected, he said.

Martens's
bail conditions include a prohibition against possessing helium or plastic
tubing and using the Internet.

Police
said following Martens's arrest they were examining all sudden- death files
from the last five years.

Canada's
right-to-die movement gained prominence in the early 1990s after the Supreme
Court of Canada rejected a plea by Sue Rodriguez of Victoria for an assisted
suicide.